Bush's leaky boat edges nearer to the rocks

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After his meeting with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas,
President George Bush told the press conference he would answer two
questions.

A score of hands shot up, but every question was the same: how
was Bush managing to do his job with scandals and problems plaguing
his Administration?

How could he not be distracted, with the House majority leader,
Tom DeLay, indicted on corruption and conspiracy charges; the
Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, being investigated over insider
share trading; Harriet Miers, his nominee for the Supreme Court,
under attack by conservatives of all stripes; and above all, the
CIA leak investigation by the special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald
extended to the most senior White House officials, including the
Vice-President, Dick Cheney?

With a bemused Abbas looking on, Bush could barely control his
anger as he insisted that he was not distracted by "background
noise".

Some background noise. What began as a CIA request in July 2003
for the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of
the CIA covert agent Valerie Plame to the conservative columnist
Robert Novak has become a crisis for the Administration.

It could lead to the indictment of Karl Rove and Cheney's chief
of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, as well as other White House and
Cheney staff. It might even destroy Cheney.

It began as an attempt by Administration officials to discredit
the former diplomat Joseph Wilson, Plame's husband. Wilson had
accused Bush and Cheney of basing their case for war in Iraq on
intelligence they knew was false. The crisis now threatens to
engulf Bush and will at the least seriously weaken his
presidency.

"Of course the President is concentrating on the big issues, but
the Fitzgerald investigation and the possible indictment of Rove
and others is the big elephant in the room," one unnamed White
House official told CNN.

Washington is abuzz with infighting, leaking by White House
aides against each other and talk of indictments. They wonder if
Fitzgerald has got a White House official to "roll" and implicate
"co-conspirators".

This week, in an attempt to protect the President, White House
aides leaked a story that Bush was furious with Rove back in 2003
for the clumsy and inept way Rove had tried to discredit Wilson.
Several days later another leak claimed Rove and Libby had
exchanged information about their contact with reporters about
Plame in the days before Novak blew her cover.

Despite the rumours and leaks, no one knows what Fitzgerald -
who runs a tight ship - will do. There have been hardly any leaks
from his office.

Online bookmakers, as good a source as any, say the odds of Rove
having to leave the White House have moved from from 6-1 to odds-on
in recent weeks.

Wilson and Plame are in some ways an odd pair. Last year, they
appeared in a picture spread in Vanity Fair, driving a flash
convertible, her blonde hair peeking out from a fashionable
headscarf, his raffishly long hair blowing in the breeze, looking
more like a Hollywood power couple rather than an ex-diplomat and a
CIA agent.

Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA, on the recommendation of
his wife, in early 2002 to check claims that Niger was getting
ready to send yellow cake uranium to Iraq.

More than a year later, after Bush in his state of the union
speech in January 2003, said British intelligence had confirmed
that Saddam Hussein was buying uranium for a nuclear weapons
program from Africa, Wilson wrote an op-ed article for The New
York Times accusing the Administration of knowingly using false
intelligence about Saddam's alleged attempt to buy African
uranium.

A few days later, Novak outed Plame and four months later,
Fitzgerald was brought in to investigate who had leaked her name to
Novak, which is a criminal offence. At the time, White House
officials insisted that there had been no leaks from the
Administration. And Bush said if there had been leaks from the
White House, the people responsible would be fired.

Almost two years later, it is clear that a number of
administration officials, including Rove and Libby, had indeed, at
the very least, talked to reporters about Wilson being married to a
CIA agent who had recommended him for the Niger mission.

The big question now, apart from who will be indicted by
Fitzgerald on charges that could include perjury, obstruction of
justice and conspiracy - all based on alleged lying to Fitzgerald's
grand jury - is whether Cheney knew what Libby was doing and how
much Bush knew about Rove's attempts to discredit Wilson.

At the least, it seems Rove's career might be over and Libby -
an architect of the Bush Administration's "pre-emptive war" policy
after September 11, 2001 - could end up in jail.

What would it mean if Rove was forced out of the White House?
For more than 31 years, since Rove met Bush in Texas and starting
planning his political career, the two have been virtually
inseparable.

David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter, who has argued that
the President would never have nominated Harriet Miers for the
Supreme Court had Rove not been distracted by the Fitzgerald
inquiry, says losing Rove would be a "devastating blow" to the
White House.

"He is truly the indispensable man," he says. "The distraction
over the past weeks with Hurricane Katrina and Harriet Miers offers
a glimpse of White House decision-making without him."

As for Libby, once a hero of the neo-conservatives at the
conservative American Enterprise Institute, the Herald was
unable to get any of the institute's leading lights to defend him
on the record.

Off the record, one said that Libby was a brilliant man who,
together with his mentor, the former deputy defence secretary and
current World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz, had provided the
intellectual muscle for the war in Iraq and for Bush's
unilateralist "pre-emptive war" policy.

If both Rove and Libby are forced out of the White House, the
Administration, beset by so many problems and challenges, would be
seriously weakened. And if Cheney was implicated it would be in
uncharted waters.